05.12.2025

 

European Commission issues a fine of €120 million to X for breaching the transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and accepts the binding commitments made by TikTok to ensure compliance with advertising transparency requirements.

The two decisions issued today by the European Commission are important steps in strengthening a safe, transparent and accountable online environment in the European Union.

Decision to sanction X for violating the DSA Regulation

European Commission has decided to sanction X with a fine of €120 million, this being the first non-compliance decision adopted under the DSA. The assessment process was opened in December 2023 and covered possible violations relating to content moderation, combatting illegal information, advertising transparency, the use of deceptive design and data access for researchers.

The infringements found by the Commission include:

• Misleading use of the "blue checkmark", contrary to the provisions of art. 25 para. (1) of the DSA on the prohibition of deceptive design. Verification marking can be obtained for a fee without a real identity verification process, which may mislead the users regarding the authenticity of accounts and significantly increases the possibility of exposing users to impersonation fraud, scams and other malicious actions.
• Lack of transparency and accessibility of the advertising repository, in violation of Article 39 of the DSA. Technical barriers and excessive delays in processing queries to the register, as well as the lack of mandatory information such as the exact content of advertisements, their topic or the identity of the legal entity paying for it lead to difficulties in identifying risks associated with online advertisement, such as the coordinated manipulating campaigns or misleading advertisements.
• Failure to provide researchers access to public data, provided for in art. 40 para. (12) of the DSA. Prohibiting independent access to public data through restrictive terms of use (e.g. scraping) and internal procedures that impose unjustified access barriers, undermines research into systemic risks such as information manipulation, external interferences, and threats to democratic processes.

 

The European Commission imposes the following measures on platform X by decision:

• within 60 working days, X must submit clear measures to stop the misleading use of the "blue checkmark";
• within 90 working days, the platform must submit an action plan on the compliance of the advertising repository and to ensure researchers access to public data. The action plan developed by X will be submitted for analysis by the European Board of Digital Services, of which ANCOM is also a member, as a Digital Services Coordinator (DSC).

Acceptance of TikTok's advertising transparency commitments under the DSA

The European Commission has accepted TikTok's binding commitments under Article 71 of DSA, which address all the concerns raised in the original investigation and preliminary findings of May 2025.

The main commitments submitted by TikTok include:

• Full transparency of the content of the advertising content - including the full content of the ads in the advertising repositories, exactly as they appear in the user feed, and providing links and URLs associated with the ads;
• accelerated updating of the register – publishing information about advertisements within a maximum of 24 hours;
• transparency of targeting criteria and aggregated audience data – providing the targeting criteria selected by advertisers along with aggregated data on the gender, age and Member State of the users reached;
• improving the search function of the advertising repository - introducing additional filtering and search options to facilitate access to information.

TikTok has a deadline of 2 to 12 months to implement the submitted commitments, depending on the complexity of the measures entailed by each commitment, the European Commission closely monitoring the platform's compliance.